 |
| Pic from: http://theoldrobots.com/omnijr2.html |
After a few days...weeks... ummm months (I am certain I was an insufferable little brat about it) of begging and pleading my wonderful parents got me one of these for christmas many years ago. I would have to say it ranks up there as probably one of the best gifts I ever got, excited was not the word. For a few joyous months I enjoyed the hell out of having a 'Robot' of my very own. You could tell it were to go, it apologized if it bumped into something, it followed you (the remote at least) around etc... Granted it was really just a cheesy R/C toy that made some noise but you have to consider what the level of tech was at the time. This would have been around the time Nintendo hit the scene. Of course, all good things come to an end and one of the battery terminals broke ending my 'robotic' bliss much sooner than I would have chosen for it to of my own accord :-( So, Robie went on a shelf with a vague plan of repair. As I got older and started fiddling with computers I kept eying the ever more grimy little plastic minion perched on my shelf and thinking "one day I will be able to actually make that into a real robot instead of a cheap R/C doo dad". And time went by. Robie survived several aborted surgeries. More time went by, many moves, many life changes... and yet Robie survived. Always staying above the line when I started rummaging around my clutter with a mind to clean things up. And finally the time has come. The first steps have been taken.
 |
| This is the original circuit board. Really is amazing what they did considering the tech of the time. |
 |
| Wider shot of the base. Unfortunately the wheels have not really survived. The grey rubber separated from the rest of the wheel carcas on the left... you can kind of see it here. In the video below you can see where it stops rotating. |
 |
| Test run with new brain (Arduino Uno and Motor Shield). Motors still work... but man is this thing noisy. |
I never really wanted to just revive Robie Jr... I wanted to transform him into an actual robotic test bed for tinkering with. Every now and then I would check the availability of new widgets and gizmos to use to Frankenstein Robie but never found a solution I liked in terms of what I could accomplish vs. what it would cost. Micro controllers were cost effective but had some limitations and were (still are in many cases) difficult to program for. Small format computers were heavy, power hungry and expensive. But no more. Systems like Arduino and Rasberry Pi have taken a lot of the sting out of trying to do smaller electronic designs and enable tinkering on the cheap. The above concoction was out and running in minutes after I got home from the store running a basic program example. I also managed to connect power to the old circuit board along with most of the response generating contacts (arm, head button) and get him to speak again for the first time in more than 20 years. Kind of surprised the memory is still intact for programming and audio. Anyway, I recorded most of his responses to put to use later in the project. Haven't figured out how to re-connect the sensor for the front contact bumper... may have goofed that wiring to much.
I am not sure if the original base is going to serve my purpose or not. If I cannot figure out how to repair/replace the wheels I will probably rig up a replacement. May do that anyway as the cheap gearing solution in the base is very noisy... not to mention the omni directional ball bearing front 'wheel' didn't work all that well when it was brand new... needless to say the years have not been kind. Perhaps now that I have sorted out some brains I can save up for the lynx motion tracked base. Should let Robie roam around a bit more freely than his original designers ever envisioned :-). Also have a notion to rig the original arms and maybe the hands (if I can find some small enough) with some servos. Kind of split between a non functional 2DOF setup that will let him wave his hands a bit, or perhaps just replacing the arms with a bit more functional 5/6 DOF arm/gripper solution. Cost is the biggest issue there, the simple 2DOF solution would probably be less than 50 bucks... the Lynx motion sight has some arms similar to what I am thinking of and they are not cheap. New base and arms are down the road at any rate.
The thing I want to do is rig a communication link With my laptop. It just so happens I do have a zigbee system lying around (yes I know... another you might be a geek if...). Anyway, The goal is to make the Arduino setup in the chassis mostly a core nervous system that reports back and gets marching orders from a program running on my laptop. That way I can futz around with some autonomous behavior programming without constantly butting up against the Arduino limits. Or course to do anything interesting I am going to need to get some sensors. The motor shield I got uses the seeeduino grove system so that should be pretty simple to put together.
Anyway I will post updates as I get to them... could be days, months, even years before it happens though. If you are interested or have questions then use the comments... might motivate me to keep at this more steadily.
No comments:
Post a Comment